Hey, It's time for Windows Weekly. It's the show that sticks in your brain like a Windows 10 nag screen.

I'm Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ. The digitial jesuit in for Leo the Fourth who is currently, on a boat.

But of course, it's a special edition because we got Paul Thurott and Mary-Jo Foley, they are bringing the fire to Microsoft Ignite.

Uh, Mary-Jo, Paul, so good to see you, you're in some sort of?

Mary-Jo: It's a connector.

Paul: It's a connector.

I'm not sure what that means,at ome point you're going to have to tell me, but,

You look good, you sound good, and it's nice to have you straight from one of the biggest microsoft events of the year.

Tell me, for the folks who haven't watched windows weekly, and are joining us for this show,

What is Microsoft Ignite supposed to be?

Paul: What is it supposed to be?

What it is, is the biggest show in the world for IT hosts

20,000 people

Mary-Jo: 25

-25,000 people, all of them crammed into this room
Off of a small hallway between two gigantic conference centers

Mary-Jo: It's the show for everything.

-It's like the show for all microsoft technologies.
Windows, sharepoint, (inaudible)...everything you would like in one show, no xbox.

(Fr. Ballecer) Wait, no xbox?

There was a small bit of onedrive news this week, that justified my travelling here.

Now, every year at Ignite, we seem to be walking away with takeaways.
Things that you like the most.

You've had just a little bit of time and I understand
it was a late night because

Mary Jo decided you need to try every craft beer in Atlanta,
But, what have been the big ticket items so far?

Big Picture, I would almost say security.

-Yep, for sure.

Security, artificial intelligence, machine learning, as well.

Well the transformation of the cloud.

-Right.
-Which is kind of ongoing.
-Definitely.

So I feel like the messaging we hear is microsoft is all in, in the cloud.

All in on security.

All in on sharepoint. I have to keep going back to sharepoint.

- Who doesn't.

-Everyone.

I know, security is pretty across the stack. When you think that its a big deal its not just high tech security

Not just server icloud security

It's security even in the fabric.

Right, it's a hybrid.

The message was hybrid.

What microsoft means by hybrid cloud is a little more comprehensive than some of the other members.

I found a new way to get quite excited,
Hybrid is an activity, right?

-Oh, that would get her very agitated.

(Fr.) Has there been much talk about Windows 10, internet of things edition?

No.
-No.

A little but not alot.

Actually, there really hasn't been alot of windows 10

There was obviously some security enhancements in the anniversary update, some coming things as well.

-Right.

Edge is getting some sort of security isolation technology.

That may or may not make it's way to other apps,

Browsers.

- That was code named Barcelona. Did you know that?
- Now I do.

Thats a really interesting feature because it's suppose to use containers in windows 10.

In the browser to isolate possible malicious attacks, and be able to detonate those to the side.

So, very interesting technology, something we'd heard rumored.

I thought it might have been a previous version windows 10. Never made it, so its looking like red stone 2.

-Yea, Spring.
-Spring. "Whatever that means".

Some of the news has been trickling back here from the day 1 keynote when Scott officially made the announcement that

Windows 10 is now on 400 million devices. How solid of a number do you find that?

Of course we've dropped down from the official target of a billion devices by the end of the year.

Will they make half a billion before the holiday season?

Thats interesting.
- I think so, do you?

So at the current clip, no.

Of course you see a seasonal bump because of the holiday. It's possible.

They don't have that kind of a goal, right?

They were talking about 1 billion active PC's by 2018.
-2018

That's moved out a bit obviously since the original proclamation.

Which I'm sure they regret.

But they do still plan and expect to get up to 1 billion active devices.

-Around that time or slightly later, perhaps.

They still are saying 1 billion, yes.

Right, I would be surprised if they hit half a billion by the end of the year.

(Fr.) Would that count devices that have been upgraded then downloaded several times?

Paul: Yea, that would get counted twice, ha ha!

Because, I've got like 15 devices on this laptop.

Actually it's interesting as you move from selling software to store

Where you can say we shipped x number of these boxes

To counting something that seems a little more ebulous

Just monthly average users or in windows 10 case,

active devices.

This is actually an instance where this is a more meaningful real world number

because it's instances of the op system running and being used actively.

It's actual users,

In the past when ms used to sell 20 million in windows 7 licences a month.

It was a real sale. It was something they could put down in the books.

But those things weren't neccesarily brought up and running

Most of them probably were not a month

That's the nature of that style of accounting.

I think for normal people, looking for something that is a real world metric

active devices is a real good one this time
-yea.

An accurate one.

It does make it a little hard to compare it to previous versions

and how they were doing at this point

With windows 7 they weren't talking about active users. It was a different metric.

So, I think this a good metric.

I think it means people are actually using it vs. just have it on a shelf somewhere.

For use maybe one day.
-Exactly.

Paul: Or maybe running another version because alot of time

in windows 7 day, it's hard to imagine they would have went back to vista but

alot of businesses might have been running XP

in other words, what they're buying is a windows 7 license

because thats what ms is selling but you get downgrade rights on that licence.

They might have gone back to an earlier version of the OS

Hard to tell from those numbers how many people 
were actually using it

which is why you see shared numbers from market share or whatever are kind of interesting.

MS can look at how many machines are hitting win update everyday or whatever

-Mmhmm.

Get figures that way as well.
-yep.

Would there be a better way to count this?

Is there a better metric that would show actual engaged windows 10 users?

I think for windows this is the most accurate way to gage the success of this thing.

I think this is the way to go.

They don't do this with everything else.

One of the things we sort of complain about is you try to understand how microsofts various businesses, they have

different ways of judging the success of different businesses

or products.

When the xbox one fell behind the PS4 for example, they stop sellling

guess how many of these things they sold

Now they talk about engagement.

Which is things like number of hrs. spent on xbox live.

against number of hrs. playing games against other people..

I think those numbers have their value.
-Yea.

Like with windows, I sort of feel like those sales mean something

because it's a retail product literally shipped in boxes
-right.

A sale's a sale.

Those kind of things make sense.

Obviously they're accounting for things in different ways depending on the product

Have either of you been able to play at all or see a demo of one of the technologies that

was announced at ignite?

That is that edge is gonna run in a micro vm

not a regular vm, but a very lightweight vm that should

sandbox it off completely from the rest of your system

I'm excited by this, I saw a demonstration

of similiar technology that

was released over at the intell developer forum

And I couldn't believe how far they come, it was so fast to load

it was basically a 15 milisecond delay over what you would get

just starting the app.

Is that hitting the floor, can you actually see it, or

is it in the preannouncement stage?

It's gonna come out to insiders first and it hasn't come out to them yet

So, i dont think unless there's some sort of simulation demos

I dont think so.

Paul: So its a RS2 feature, something thats gonna come

in the spring.

It's probably gonna come to other applications in windows, in 3rd party apps, and 3rd party browsers

Mary-Jo: Yes.

Which where it gets interesting.

Not because I feel that edge is ever going to have meaningful usage here but

You want to protect the whole range of users obviously

So hopefully that happens quickly as well

Mary-Jo: If you go back and you look at what ms done in this space

they're were all these ms research projects

dating back 10 years

Where they were trying to figure out what you could do

in the browser

to isolate potential malware attacks, malware and other kinds of attacks

and I feel like this has finally becoming a product

now that they've researched all that

Other things like gazelle, all these weird code names coming out of

ms research

where they were doing the work in that space

I feel like this thing barcelona, has to do with containers, windows 10

is kind of the fruition of all that.
-yea

Maybe maturing is the wrong way, but sort of an evolution

on thinking behind security for a long time was trying to

proactively figure things out

use machine learning and different things